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Genealogy and Oregon history fans among winners as old Multnomah County records move online

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Multnomah County Archivist Terry Baxter displays the original blueprints for the Interstate Bridge. The blueprints are among thousands of documents slated for digitization in an effort to preserve and make them more widely available to the public.
(Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian)

Visits to the archives are by appointment only, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Thursday.

-Researchers who know which records they’d like to view and don’t want to travel to Gresham can make an appointment at the county’s records research room, at 501 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. County records staff members will retrieve the document from the archives.

To schedule an appointment, call 503-988-3741.

Correction appended

The most extensive record of Multnomah County's nearly
159-year history is stored in a Gresham basement.

Here, near an industrial site off 190th Avenue,
visitors can see registration cards from the first election in which Oregon women
were allowed to vote.

They can leaf through a 990-page leather-bound logbook of
every person to move into the Multnomah County Poor Farm after it was built in 1911.

Or enjoy some 1964 postcard-sized mockups of the Delta Dome,
a professional football stadium local leaders planned but failed to build at
Delta Park.

A district attorney's case register from the Prohibition era
lists charges such as "operating a distillery," a long journey from modern-day Portland's
exaltation of microbrews and high-end spirits.

There's even a truly priceless rarity tucked on the shelves:
County-issued 25-cent bills. They date back to the Great Depression, when Multnomah
County created its own tender to stimulate the local economy.

These yellowed, fragile items are available for anyone to
view, as long as they're willing and able to schedule an appointment with a
county archivist and make the trip to the warehouse.

Come this time next year, many of them will be just a computer
click away.

Multnomah County is in the process of converting many of the
facility's 3,000 boxes of paper records and 20,000 reels of microfilm to
digital format, making them available to anyone with curiosity and an Internet
connection. The process began weeks ago, timing that happened to coincide with
National Archives Month.

An 1866 plat map of Portland includes handwritten updates through to the 1980s.Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian

"Storing them will be a question of server space, not physical space," said
Terry Baxter, the county's archivist.

Portland digitized some of its paper archives several years
ago, but Multnomah County will become the only other metro area government to
make digital versions of their paper archives available to the public.

Many of the most often-used archival records will be online
by next year, but the project will continue for years to come. It's all part of
an effort to preserve Multnomah County's history while making it available to a
broader audience.

"They've taken better care of this material than many
counties," Greene said. "National surveys of records held by county clerks and
historical societies are not very encouraging overall, so the fact that
Multnomah County has this kind of material to digitize is quite impressive."

While archives experts say it's unclear yet whether
digitization increases the life of a document, they generally argue that it's a
huge step toward promoting government transparency and social history.

Digitization also makes historical records more accessible
to genealogists and historians who live outside the metro area, but might have ancestry in Portland.

The archives room, a roughly 1,000-square-foot space stacked
floor-to-ceiling with boxes and rolls of old blueprints, smells like an old
book.

A cavernous room nearby holds records with a shorter
shelf-life, such as court documents and health clinic files. Ten times more
voluminous than the records that the county has marked for permanent retention,
these temporary records are all destined to be destroyed once a mandatory
holding time expires.

Contrast that tangible presentation of construction plans with
computerized drawings designers created for the new version of the Sellwood
Bridge, under construction now.

"Those records are all born digital," said Jenny Mundy, the
county's electronic records management analyst. When the Sellwood Bridge
overhaul is finished, planners will simply transfer their files to the county's
off-site servers.

Digitizing the fragile documents in the basement is meant to
protect them from the wear and tear of age. Researchers who view items from the
archives aren't allowed to bring pens, for fear ink might stain the documents.